http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/john-paul...money-politics
John Paul Stevens: We need to level the playing field
Quote:
Stevens challenged a far-reaching holding in a 1976 case, Buckley v. Valeo, which established that campaign finance laws can only regulate donations to campaigns, not spending by campaigns.
Stevens called this the “central error” in the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence on campaign finance issues. “Unlimited campaign expenditures impair the process of democratic self-government,” he said, “and create a risk that successful candidates will pay more attention to the interests of non-voters who provided them with money than to the interests of voters who elected them.”
He called for a constitutional amendment to fix the mistake, and laid out his preferred wording:
Neither the First Amendment nor any provision of this Constitution shall be construed to prohibit the Congress or any state from imposing reasonable limits on the amount of money that candidates for public office or their supporters may spend on their campaign for public office.
Putting limits on spending would dramatically change the process. The problem is most people don't seem to mind the way things are. You might hear people complain about the frequency of commercials but that's it.
There's a real time aspect to presidential campaigns that marginalizes the actual voting process. The attention paid to polling data wouldn't be so important to candidates and big donors if the process wasn't so expensive. The candidate (that's drops out) I wanted to vote for didn't get to benefit from my vote. He gives it to candidate X (via endorsement) because of a sudden shift in money (his and others) that resulted from that last nights polls.